


Marginal

by museaway



Category: Smallville
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-02-02
Updated: 2004-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 20:39:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/museaway/pseuds/museaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't ever quite what you expect. domestic!Clex</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marginal

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Clex with Kids challenge.

Lex stood at the window and watched his breath fog the glass, a wet spot that began to fade from the outside in, leaving the glass as clear as it was before his exhale.

He breathed out a second time but was met with the same result, and it was enough to make him frown. The glass was unmarked, no indication that he'd had any effect on it. Yet it was cool against his forehead, and the penthouse was quiet and calm.

Clark wasn't home. Clark had been working long hours at the Planet, trying to prove himself to the _higher ups_ as a good reporter. He returned home late at night and left early in the morning, often earlier than Lex did, and Lex woke before the sun.

Lex knew better than to ask Clark if he was working too hard. Clark would call him a hypocrite and point out the dark circles beneath Lex's eyes. Then he'd walk out of the room and not talk for an hour.

As much as Lex loved him, it was so hard to make a relationship work when there was such a distance between them, constantly growing.

"I'm just trying to do the best job I can," Clark always said when Lex asked why he missed dinner again or forgot to call when he'd be late or crashed on the couch instead of coming to bed after a night of stakeouts with Lois.

Five years together, and up until this one, Lex had been able to count the number of times he'd cried upon one hand. But recently, he'd fallen asleep with his face wet and Clark turned away from him on the bed.

And perhaps he shouldn't have been surprised by any of it. After all, Lionel had, for years, filled his head with the notion that nothing ever lasts, that no relationship is sturdy enough to stand the test of time. He shouldn't have been surprised that his own was ambling toward failure, and yet he was. Somehow, despite the lectures and the doubts and the fears that had plagued him since the day the meteors crashed into Smallville, Lex had fallen in love and come to believe that he and Clark really would be together always.

The doorknob rattled, and the ambitious reporter breezed through the door. Lex heard him bustle around in the entry way, setting down his bag and hanging his coat in the hall closet. He heard the socked feet pad across the carpet and felt two large hands come to rest at his waist.

"Hey," Clark murmured, kissing the side of his neck, and Lex closed his eyes and didn't move.

"Hey," he said, and his voice was low.

Clark sensed that something was the matter because he nuzzled his face against Lex's neck and whispered, "What's wrong?"

Clark's glasses pressed sharply into his skin when Lex shook his head. "Nothing," he lied, wishing Clark would pull away. "I'm just tired."

He could feel the grin form against his skin. "Then maybe we should go to bed," Clark said and kissed him again. Lex shrugged his shoulder to his ear and stepped away.

"Not right now," he said and rubbed the thin black cotton covering his arms, smooth beneath his fingertips. "Maybe later."

Clark sighed and reached up to his face, removing his glasses, and began to wipe the lenses gently with the front of his shirt. "That's what you said yesterday," he said.

"Well, I was tired yesterday."

"And the day before."

Without the glasses, Clark's stare was harder and more direct. He held Lex's gaze and refused to break it, eyes wide and jaw set. Once, this was as much flirting as Lex would allow himself: a few stolen glances at the pretty farmboy bringing his produce, and nothing more. Lex would revel in their length, in their depth, in their silence and intensity. He would fall asleep at night dreaming that those same green eyes were still fixed upon him in the dark, that he would one day wake to see Clark peering at him from a pillow away and be allowed to stare and to smile and to touch.

Now those same eyes filled him with a sadness profound and troubling, and he was the first to look away. To close his eyes. To wonder if he never should have opened them to begin with.

"I just," he started, opening his mouth and closing it again several times before the words finally came to him, foreign and painful in his throat. "I don't think this is working."

Clark flinched as if Lex's words had been laced with kryptonite, and the glasses fell from his hand.

"What?"

The smile on Lex's face was sad and strained, more a struggle to keep from breaking apart than anything else. "Look at us," he said. "We never talk anymore. You're never home. You spend more nights on that sofa than our bed. I talk to your voicemail more than you. I--"

"Lex --"

"No, please," he said, holding up a hand. "Please, don't. This is already difficult for me, Clark. I never thought I'd have to say this, but I can't do this anymore."

"What d'you mean, 'this'?"

"This, Clark. Us. I-- Christ." Lex pressed his forehead to the heel of his palm and took a deep breath. "I can't live like this anymore."

"Why?"

Clark's voice broke, and Lex didn't have the strength to look at his face. There was enough tension in the room to make the hurt tangible.

"You know why," Lex said quietly, and he turned his head and looked down on the city. Everything looked so small from his vantage point. He could just barely discern various cars waiting for a traffic light to turn green.

"I thought we were going to spend our lives together," Clark said from behind him.

"I did, too," Lex told him. "I thought we were going to get old together and raise a family and --"

"What?"

Lex blinked, his concentration broken. "I'm sorry?"

"What did you mean, raise a family?"

Turning from the window, Lex rubbed a hand over his scalp as he regarded Clark, who stood a few feet away twisting his hands awkwardly in front of him. "Just what I said. I know we've never talked about it, but I kept meaning to bring it up."

Clark's face softened. "You wanted to have kids with me?" he asked in a small voice, and for a moment Lex remembered him as fifteen again, shy and beautiful and unspoiled.

"Oh, yes," Lex told him, and the smile on his face was bright and pained. "I've been thinking of it for a while, now. I even looked into different methods, adopting or utilizing a surrogate mother."

"I -- I didn't know," Clark said, and he shook his head back and forth and stared down at the carpet. "I thought you were getting tired of me, or." He raised his hands to his temples but didn't touch, let them hover an inch away from his face, as though he were trying to channel his thoughts. "You always seem so sad when I come home. That or tired. You don't want me to touch you. You don't --"

"I don't like you to feel obligated," Lex said quietly, and he felt raw even saying it.

Clark's hands fell to his sides. "I have never felt obligated with you," he said, almost harshly, in protest.

"Christ," Lex said, and his eyes stung. He bent his neck and touched the edge of his sleeve beneath each eye, but the room swam before him anyway.

Clark's words drifted to him, broken and small. "Lex...do. Do you still love me?" He rubbed his arms to ward off the cold settling deep inside of him, and his breath caught in his throat. He couldn't breathe.

Lex stepped forward and clasped his arms around Clark tightly. "You know I do," he said into Clark's ear, and Clark choked in air and nodded. Lex's own breathing was unsteady, and he clung.

Clark wrapped his arms around Lex's neck and rocked against him. "If you love me, then why? Why do you -- how -- how can you say you can't do this?"

"Because I can't do this _alone_ ," Lex whispered, and his fingers curled into the brushed cotton of Clark's shirt. "When I said I wanted this life, I meant with _you_. I can't make this work by myself."

"I didn't know," Clark whispered, his voice quick and thin. "I thought -- I thought that maybe you'd changed your mind or that you didn't want me or that you --"

"Shhh." Lex stroked Clark's back, and they stood quiet for a long time, Clark crying into the fabric of Lex's shirt. Outside, the setting sun fought against the cloud cover, and the bloodstained horizon gradually faded to twilight. One by one, the stars flickered into place.

Clark held Lex to his chest and breathed in his soap and his cologne, the lingering scent of fabric softener on his shirt. Skin so familiar against his own, smooth and damp and he'd missed this _so_ much.

"I'd like to make a family with you," he whispered after a very long time. His voice was thick and heavy, his eyelashes stuck together.

"Clark -- " Lex began, and his tone was one of reluctance and melancholy.

"No, I mean it," Clark said with more certainty, moving his hands slowly across Lex's back. "I still want to spend my life with you. That's why I'm here. That's why I wear this ring. It's why --" He took a deep breath. "If it takes two to make this work, then it should take two to make it end. And I don't want it to end. I won't let it."

Lex shook his head while his right hand stroked Clark's hair. He didn't want to hear any more. "You can't--"

"No. No!" Clark cried. "You listen. I _love_ you. I have always, always loved you. And I want to do this."

"I love _you_ ," Lex promised, "but love isn't the issue here. Things might be okay for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, but we're eventually going to end up back here just like this."

"You don't know that," Clark said, closing his eyes and nudging his nose along Lex's neck.

"And you don't know otherwise," Lex said quietly, fingers treading dark curls.

"No," Clark whispered, "I don't."

And he kissed the side of Lex's face and his forehead and finally his mouth, lips warm and salty from tears, tongue warm and reassuring. Wet against Lex's own. Slow and steady. Home.


End file.
